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The kilogram is getting heavier, which means, correspondingly, that we are all
getting ever so slightly lighter.

The official kilogram, a small lump of platinum-iridium in a vault in Paris,
has been slowly and somewhat mysteriously gaining weight over the course of
its 137-year life. But because, philosophically speaking, the official
kilogram always weighs a kilogram, the practical result is that everything
else is apparently not as heavy as was thought.

This has long been a problem for science, if a boon for dieters.

Now a group of British researchers, having identified the source of the weight
gain as mercury